146 Scarcity and Surfeit
July 1996. The scaling down of international financial assistance following
the derailment of democracy in 1993 and its eventual freeze in 1995 follow-
ing the initiation of the regroupment policy placed the Burundi government
in a desperate economic and political position both internally and externally.
If the government's back was to the wall with the 1995 freeze of external
financial assistance and support, regional economic sanctions (1996-1999)
nearly brought it to its knees. Its only recourse was an internal economic
environment long neglected and a cash crop whose producers have remained
on the margins of government priorities. Salter rightly argues that the credi-
bility of region's sanctions against Burundi rested squarely with their ability
to prevent it from exporting its coffee crop.14"
When Burundi found a crevice in the otherwise well-intentioned regional
initiative, it broke through, selling its coffee through Mombasa via Tanzania
initially and later through Rwanda as Rwandan coffee. And when these
avenues proved expensive and unsustainable, Burundi switched to the
Zambian lake port of Mpulungu as the gateway to Durban in South Africa.141
As indicated earlier, with the escalation of the civil war, defence expenditure
became an overriding priority and finances for arms purchases had to be
found if the government was decisively to defeat the rebellion through its
chosen strategy - in the battle field. It meant the government could even
mortgage future coffee receipts in exchange for desperately needed arms.
The Ausha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement is in consonance over the
need for reforms in the coffee subsecto~l~~ However, and perhaps because of
the broad scope of that agreement, its recommendations are not only unclear
and unfocused, they ignore other related structural impediments to increas-
ing the production of coffee and payments to the producers. Export diversifi-
cation is one possible solution to getting out of the country's over-depend-
ence on coffee for foreign exchange. The coffee subsector is in need of
reforms and restructuring to make it more transparent and responsive to
external as well as internal stimuli. There is, in the same vein, the need for a
rapprochement between rural and urban development priorities on the one
hand, and between the centre and the periphery on the other. It is only these
realignments in the social and economic relations within Burundi that will
make it possible to mediate satisfactorily the competing claims of peasants'
demands for better payment for their produce and government security and
development priorities.
The reforms in the coffee suhsector, which have so far been only modest-
ly successful, should continue as soon as a conducive opportunity for their
implementation is at hand. The seemingly deliberate attempts by the author-
ities to delay reforms in the sector will only serve to dim the prospects of cof-
fee as a 'strategic sector' in the economy. The IMF crystallises some of the
concerns woven in this chapter, pointing out the major stumbling blocks to
~rivatisation, which include: